Melanie Gray has had a colourful life – to say the least!
By the age of 30 you could say she had experienced most things that it would take most people their entire lives to discover, if at all.
Born in a small, Western Australian wheatbelt town, Melanie spent her childhood in country towns, catching tadpoles and playing hide and seek in the bush-lands around her home. She grew up in a happy, financial family, attending private school and achieving straight A’s throughout her education. Melanie was Champion Girl, and she played national basketball in between professional modelling – it seemed the path of success was set out in front of her, all before she had even finished high school.
Yet a lack of fulfilment and curiosity prompted her to make some questionable decisions, resulting in an array of challenging - and, at times, unthinkable - hardships. After years of experiencing great loss, potential bankruptcy, drug abuse, coercive control, domestic violence, and single parenthood, enough was finally enough. At Melanie’s lowest point, she chose to take responsibility for her life, looking deep inside and making the choices necessary to create a life that she loved and felt in control of.
The lessons learnt were powerful, and included:
Embracing failings and mistakes as gifts to grow and nudge you towards a life you truly love.
Learning that under whatever circumstances we arrive in, that we arrive here with the gift of life.
Whatever we face we need to choose our responses carefully. We must learn to take full responsibility for our own choices, in order to relinquish ourselves from personal and social judgement and assumption. And by choosing to live like this, we gain the right to change our own circumstances.
Melanie has folded origami cranes for most of her life, and always found comfort in the structure, beauty, and meditative practice of that. When forced to start her life over, Melanie went back to this practice and soon found herself creating massive paper installations. The positive feedback and acclaim were encouraging, and she saw the potential for a new career path. Melanie went on to create 22folds, an ecommerce business that sells a range of products created from origami cranes. These products are created to empower, acknowledge, and ignite something within others, and act as a daily reminder for each individual to strive for a life of purpose and joy.
In recent times Melanie has been exploring new ways to convey her message through working with Unfolded Origami cranes, reminding her that we are always evolving, and there is beauty within both the planning and the journey, not just the destination.
Melanie has been involved in many art installation projects throughout Australia, creating public art pieces in conjunction with charities such as Miracle Babies and Layne Beachley’s AIM for the Stars foundation. Each installation was created to help shine a light on the great work that these charities and foundations are doing in their chosen fields, to raise money and awareness, and to impact change.
After achieving this, Melanie felt a higher calling to share her story from the stage with a broader audience so that others, too, could come to live the life that they dream of.